Archive for the ‘Hardware’ Category

At the end of last year we received an email on our support center from an unusual location. It was sent by Giovanni Bianchini an italian physicist researching at Concordia Station, located in East Antarctica (see the red dot in the map below!) where the hottest temperature is around -25C?/-13F. He was working on a project based on Arduino and yes, this is the Arduino project based in the most southern location ever! When we realized that we thought of getting in touch with him and discover the details.

Giovanni was very happy to start a conversation with us, shared some pictures and explained why and how he is using Arduino in Antartica.

Tell us a bit more about Concordia Station and what you are doing there…

Concordia Station is a scientific research base placed more or less in the middle of the plateau region, East Antarctica. This site is peculiar for the fact of being surrounded of at least 1000 km of ice plain in every direction, a condition that provides relatively stable and unperturbed weather conditions and a dry and very transparent atmosphere, that is the reason for which it has been chosen for astronomic and atmospheric observations. (more…)

Alexander Kozusyev wrote us from Kiev to share how he introduced Arduino in his semi-auto production line creating decor by casting polyurethane foam.

Production line has two independent CNC 3-axis manipulator. The first spraying of release agent. Second automatic pouring polyurethane into the mold. Before spraying or pouring read RFID unique code for the mold, and then loads the G-CODE from the database server based MySQL. After pouring, the mould is moved to the waiting area.

He used Arduino Mega to read RFID codes and to control some components, an Arduino Uno with firmware GRBL version 0.9 to control the CNC. Take a look at the video:

Make Magazine published a short report of the panel taking place at the Hardware Innovation Workshop, yesterday in New York City. Massimo Banzi and Jason Kridner, co-founder of BeagleBoard, were on the stage talking about the evolution of microcontrollers:

Makers love to develop on their favorite microcontrollers. The creators behind two of the most popular took boards the stage at the New York Hardware Innovation Workshop (HIW) in a panel moderated by MAKE’s own Matt Richardson. Although makers might like to argue about which is the best platform, there was plenty of common ground for these two panelists.

Massimo Banzi, Co-Founder of the Arduino Project, began the session with a short discussion on how and why Arduino got started.

“Every time you design a system to do everything, you end up with a system designed to do nothing,” Massimo says. “The challenge is to build a platform that solves a simple problem for a specific group of people: beginners for example.”

I am delighted to welcome Stefano Guglielmetti who, together with other Arduino friends/supporters, accepted to start experimenting with Arduino Yun and write a blog post to present some hands-on results. Starting today we are going to host a series of guest bloggers exploring different unique features of our new board.

Stefano, has more than 16 years of experience in the Internet industry, working both with small companies and start-ups up to very big and complex environments. His post below was orginally published at this link.

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Finally!!! Finally I put my hands on a brand new Arduino Yún. I’ve been waiting for this a long, loooong time. I’ve been playing with Arduino since the “diecimila” model came out and I, as a lot of people, always suffered the lack of connectivity and of real computing power. I tried to solve some of these problems using RaspberryPi and/or Electric Imp, but I always missed the Arduino approach… easy, lots of shields and Arduino ready parts, a lot of documentation, a strong community and the freedom of Open Source.

Now one of my dreams came true, and every time I go deeper into the discovery of the Yún’s capabilities, I find something amazing, very smart and very well done.

I won’t describe the platform itself, as many articles talking about that are already published and there will be many more to come. I’ll start directly with a real life example, in just a few hours I finally built something really, really useful to me, something I already built several times in various ways but none of which really satisfied me.

The task is pretty simple, and I believe it will be very useful to many people: I need to be alerted in real time when I receive some important emails. Not all the emails: we provide customer care for many clients, with different SLAs, and I need to be alerted only for the most important ones. Moreover, sometimes I look forward to receiving a precise email… a shipment confirmation, a mail from a special someone… I need something flexible, eye catching, that doesn’t depend on my computer or my cellphone (that always has only 1% battery) (more…)

As announced a few days ago, the newest addition to the Arduino family, the Arduino Yún, will be available starting September 10. This is the first in a series of posts that will describe some of the Yún’s unique features. Today, we’ll focus on the hardware.

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The Yún is unique in the Arduino lineup, as it has a lightweight Linux distribution to complement the traditional microcontroller interface. It also has WiFi and Ethernet connections on board, enabling it to communicate with networks out of the box. The Yún’s Linux and Arduino processors communicate through the Bridge library, allowing Arduino sketches to send commands to the command line interface of Linux.

Introduction
The Arduino Yún has the same footprint as an Arduino Uno but combines an ATmega32U4 microcontroller (the same as the Leonardo) and a Linux system based on the Atheros AR9331 chipset. Additionally, there are built-in Ethernet and WiFi capabilities. The combination of the classic Arduino programming experience and advanced internet capabilities afforded by a Linux system make the Yún a powerful tool for communicating with the internet of things.

The Yún’s layout keeps the I/O pins the same as the Arduino Leonardo. As such, the Yún is compatible with the most shields designed for Arduino.

With the Yún’s auto-discovery system, your computer can recognize boards connected to the same network. This enables you to upload sketches wirelessly to the Yún. You can still upload sketches to the Yún through the micro-USB connector just as you would with the Leonardo. (more…)

As announced a few days ago, the newest addition to the Arduino family, the Arduino Yún, will be available starting September 10. This is the first in a series of posts that will describe some of the Yún’s unique features. Today, we’ll focus on the hardware.

———————–

The Yún is unique in the Arduino lineup, as it has a lightweight Linux distribution to complement the traditional microcontroller interface. It also has WiFi and Ethernet connections on board, enabling it to communicate with networks out of the box. The Yún’s Linux and Arduino processors communicate through the Bridge library, allowing Arduino sketches to send commands to the command line interface of Linux.

Introduction
The Arduino Yún has the same footprint as an Arduino Uno but combines an ATmega32U4 microcontroller (the same as the Leonardo) and a Linux system based on the Atheros AR9331 chipset. Additionally, there are built-in Ethernet and WiFi capabilities. The combination of the classic Arduino programming experience and advanced internet capabilities afforded by a Linux system make the Yún a powerful tool for communicating with the internet of things.

The Yún’s layout keeps the I/O pins the same as the Arduino Leonardo. As such, the Yún is compatible with the most shields designed for Arduino.

With the Yún’s auto-discovery system, your computer can recognize boards connected to the same network. This enables you to upload sketches wirelessly to the Yún. You can still upload sketches to the Yún through the micro-USB connector just as you would with the Leonardo. (more…)

What happens to electronic components at cryogenic temperatures? That’s the main question Mikail tried to answer with his experiment using liquid nitrogen and Arduino: 65.3Mhz@-196°C. Check the video below to see the magic: